Please note that our site uses cookies to provide basic functionality and feedback.
By continuing to use our site you accept this use. More information is provided in our privacy page.
Don't show me this again.

Edited by Lionel Gossman, this volume contains three programmatic essays by Michelet. The first two are available here for the first time in English translation. The third, the Preface to the 1869 edition of the Histoire de France, originally published in its first English translation by Edward K. Kaplan in his Michelet’s Poetic Vision (1977), has been revised by the translator for this volume. Curated by leading scholars and translators this volume provides essential reading for anybody interested in modern French and European history.

One of the greatest Romantic historians and immensely popular during his lifetime, Jules Michelet (1798-1874) fell into disfavour among the positivist historians who came after him and who regarded his work with disdain as "literature." In the 1920s and 30s, however, he began to be rediscovered and rehabilitated by the members of the influential Annales school. The objects of Michelet’s interest—living conditions, popular mentalities, laws and the arts, the historian’s relation to the objects of his study, no less than political history—have since come to occupy a central place in modern historical research.

A free online-only supplement contains an essay on Michelet by John Stuart Mill from the Edinburgh Review (January 1844) and several studies of Michelet by Lionel Gossman.

The University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences of Princeton University has generously contributed to the publication of this volume.

3. Michelet, Introduction to World History (1831)Translated by Flora Kimmich
Notes and Clarifications

4. Michelet, Opening Address at the Faculty of Letters, 9 January 1834Translated by Lionel Gossman

5. Michelet, Preface to History of France (1869), with Introduction by Edward K. KaplanTranslated by Edward K. Kaplan

6. Select Bibliography of Critical Writing on Michelet

Flora Kimmich translates from French and German. Her translation of Gustav Droysen’s classic History of Alexander the Great—the
first into English—was published in 2012 by the American Philosophical
Society. Flora has also translated Friedrich Schiller's drama Fiesco's Conspiracy at Genoa for OBP.

Edward K. Kaplanis Kevy and Hortense Kaiserman Professor in the Humanities at Brandeis University. He is the author of Michelet's Poetic Vision (1977) and Mother Death, selected passages from Michelet's Journal in English translation (1984), and the editor of L’Insecte and L’Oiseau in Paul Viallaneix’s 21- volume edition of Michelet’s Oeuvres complètes. He has also published translations of Baudelaire and influential studies of the modern Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel.

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
license (CC-BY 3.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute
and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of
the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any
way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Attribution should include the following information:

Jules Michelet, On History:Introduction
to World History (1831); Opening Address at the Faculty of Letters, 9
January 1834; Preface to History of France (1869). Trans. Flora
Kimmich, Lionel Gossman and Edward K. Kaplan. Cambridge, UK: Open Book
Publishers, 2013, http://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0036

The translation of the 1869 Preface to the History of France is based on the edition of Charles Morazé (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962), and checked against Michelet’s Oeuvres complètes, volume IV, ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1974).